Archive

Tag Archives: drone technology

A man in a flimsy T-shirt and polyester running shorts and running shoes affixed to snowshoes with circular-shaped surfaces runs

On a two-inch blanket of freshly-fallen snow  on a flat two-acre field on a farm whose owners have given him permission to run for an hour on their land.

He is also wearing glasses that provide a visual readout of what the drone flying overhead is recording. The drone moves according to his voice commands. His last command was for the drone to maintain a position twenty meters over his head, focal point the surface of the snow, field of view to include the running man and a circle of ten meters’ diameter with him at the center.

The conditions are ideal. The temp is just at freezing and it is windless and the snow is doing a remarkable job of retaining the impressions of the snowshoes.

What the man is doing is drawing. He himself is the dot-drawing stylus. An inset in the views reen in his glasses shows him the entire field on which he is running, with his position on the field represented by a green dot, and with his footstrikes trailing him represented as blue dots.

He has not been running long, but he is already on the second iteration of the array of comic-book-style panels that will contain the images of real-time running that he is doing now. An hour will give him enough time to fill in the panels with line drawings with enough detail to discern his facial features.

“Bogie, I want a drink,” he says, and the drone swoops down and dangles tubing connected to the modest water supply it is carrying. Three swallows is sufficient.

“Resume position above my head.” Bogie whizzes upward.

“Play ‘Running On Empty’ by Jackson Browne, any live version with David Lindlay,” he tells his audio feed.

The music starts.

“I effing love technology, I do I do I do,” he exults as he runs, his breath making a puff-pattern of condensation.

the dart left the hand of the expert player/and its tip clove the cork/within the quasi-trapezoidal section of the dartboard/that yielded a triple seventeen/to win the game

the dart quiesced in its foam-rubber nest while its owner and operator attempted to persuade/a much younger female in a cotton dress designed to reveal but not flaunt/to accompany him and his pickup truck to a nearby hotel

she declined

the dart next unseeingly saw the light of day/in the woods near a campground/where its owner, irritated by the rat-a-tat-tat of a woodpecker/decided to teach the woodpecker a lesson

but midmotion of the dart-launch that would have pierced the bird/where her spinal cord met her head/an artificial wasp plunged its titanium-alloyed stinger/into the dartsman’s throwing hand

the dart missed the tree altogether/and was abandoned by its owner/who drove himself one-handed to the hospital/where baffled surgeons removed his necrotized hand and half the adjacent forearm

while the operator of the artificial wasp sent a drone/to retrieve the fallen dart and bring it to her/for documentation/of a successful field test/of one of the newest weapons/developed by the department of defense

as for the wasp/it darted homeward as well